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Photo Book Reviews

Photographs (Aperture) by David Hilliard Reviewed by José M. Gonzalez Article rating: 5.14

In his first major photographic publication, David Hilliard debuts his profound, poignant, and sometimes disturbing images of fictitious reality on the internal life set in the complexities of modern American society. In Portraits, Hilliard serves up a panorama of everyday life, his life, juxtaposed to each event’s social implication. The work itself is not stark and one-sided, there is comedy and humor; a more rounded view of our culture.

This encompassing perspective lends itself to questioning as opposed to judging. Hilliard opens this discussion on multiple sides of culture. There are many important themes that run through Hilliard’s photography. Homosexuality, heterosexuality, the essence of masculinity, femininity, the father/son relationship, solitude, and isolation from a group; are all major themes in Photographs. In Swimmers, Hilliard shows isolation through one boy apart from the group that is across the river. The same image brings into focus masculinity with bicycles on the right side of the piece. Rosemary’s Dock is another example of this with girls.

Through the use of multiple frames, mostly in diptych and triptych format, Hilliard, who at one point wanted to be a filmmaker, narrates a story. Using more than one frame to sum up the entire image, Hilliard focuses on different things in each of the frames. This way of setting up a photograph inherently leaves clues for the spectator to figure out, interpreting the images one sees as a story happening. Hilliard ultimately directs the eye to go where he believes they should go in order to interpret his narratives.

Staging these partial realities, Hilliard directs the spectator through the photographs into questioning what they see. How do these images, all cut up, relate to the world in which we live?

Images of a man sleeping through seemingly important news, another man in a feminine pose juxtaposed to his reflection in a paned doorframe that is rough and masculine, a man lost in a seemingly unending sea of commercial cereal boxes, two young girls yielding their feminine power over a man; this encompasses the thoughtfulness Hilliard used in composing his images. He wants the viewer to see these mundane images and figure out, not what is wrong with them, but how the models in their environment represent us.

The color on the images is hyper-saturated, intense, and lush. Hilliard intends on showing this as fiction, a fantasy. What are mostly all natural shots are more wondrous than nature itself in the vibrancy of the colors.

But the artist works from within his scope of reality, as the pieces of his father that begin the book show. These father images deal with many themes, such as age, time, masculinity, and identity. But the overwhelming sense of distance between father and son permeates every image. These are images of fiction, not reality. They are images of a person not portraits.

Photographs, by David Hilliard, is an introspective compilation of fifty four-color images from over a decade of work, highlighting his multi-image narratives. The book contains a comprehensive introductory essay on Hilliard’s work by Charlotte Cotton, an interview of Hilliard by Vince Aletti, as well as a chronology of Hilliard’s work. The compilation of photographs is extremely poignant in its presentation, imagery, and social commentary; and vibrant in its color and imagination.

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